Sam Coleman, PhD, MSW

Intellectually, I’m first and foremost an anthropologist, more specifically, one committed to the cultural materialist paradigm that applies science to human thought and behavior. Another intellectual (and emotional) dimension of my life is Japanese society, culture and language, which I’ve been studying and writing about since the late 1960s.

My present-day “meanings for living” (the Japanese call them ikigai) are several. Wife Hiroko and sons Ken and Rei remind me that I’m needed (if only now and then), and they help ‘keep me real.’ What else is important that doesn’t go into a CV? Among those influential life experiences, a wonderful undergraduate education in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1960s that didn’t leave me in grinding debt, thanks to an enlightened state policy barring tuition that has since withered. A path to resisting the Vietnam War draft at the turn of the decade through conscientious objector status saved me from prison and gave me two-plus years’ experience in a Veterans Administration hospital inpatient ward and surgery, thanks entirely to genuine war resisters ready to sacrifice far more than I could. A bitter defeat in my bid for tenure at the University of Oregon 25 years later taught me a lot about the politics of academia, thrusting me afterward into a continual process of career reinventions studded with bright spots and sputters. Some readers perusing my interests might ask, ‘Can’t this guy settle on one specialty?’ Believe me I tried, and I’ve learned so much in the process.

My intellectual predilections and life experiences animate my concern with pressing issues today like poverty, exploitation, and war and peace, hopefully pointing to solutions. Each discussion I have, each presentation I give, and each of my writings resulting in publication renews my sense of agency, which all of us need so badly in this era of powerlessness and anomie.

Sam Coleman, PhD, MSW, August, 2024